Sean Payton demands his QB have an iron grip of his offense. Russell Wilson couldn't, so he'll be out of Denver

It was early August in Englewood, Colorado, when I saw the first breadcrumb of frustration in Sean Payton’s offensive installation.

The sun was blazing, padded practices had begun to stack up for the Denver Broncos, and Payton looked pissed. Quarterback Russell Wilson and the offense had just broken their huddle, and the head coach stepped in between the offense and defense. Payton was too far away to hear, but his gesturing spoke volumes, sending the offense back to re-huddle, before breaking and moving swiftly to the line beneath his glare. Afterward, wideout Jerry Jeudy said there had been a recurring issue with speed. Payton wanted it all faster. Spit the play out faster, break the huddle faster, get to the line faster. If that was all done properly, it left Wilson standing at the line with an array of detailed calls and checks to execute. Put simply: Be fast and know what the hell you’re doing so the offense operated the way Payton designed it.

The entire offense.

“He’s making sure we’ve got our assignment and are playing fast and are doing everything we need to do,” Jeudy told Yahoo Sports after practice wrapped. “He’s making that the main focus on everything he does. If he doesn’t like a certain play, he’ll redo it and redo it until he likes it. If he doesn’t like how we run out of the huddle, we come back and do it again. It’s just perfection that he’s looking for in everything we’re doing.”

Perfection.

When you get past the very consequential matter of Wilson’s contract, "perfection" is the word that should resonated loudest in his benching Wednesday. From the day Payton was hired, his aim at quarterback was to achieve what he enjoyed for 15 years with Drew Brees. Namely, recreate a quarterback who knew the multitude of layers in his offense and who could recite them with speed and detail from the first page to the last. And most important, step out on gameday and operate every nuance of the scheme with the precision of the Vienna Philharmonic.

This is what he had in New Orleans with Brees, a player who was so maniacal in his film study and mastery of Payton’s system, new quarterbacks would come into the organization and get steamrolled in their positional meetings. In Brees’ mind, when you walked into that quarterbacks room you needed to know everything about the offense and keep up with that week’s installation. If you didn’t, you were getting left behind. It was a practice that was often so ruthless, former Saints quarterbacks coach Joe Lombardi held extra tutoring sessions with players without Brees in attendance so that he could teach at a more forgiving pace.

This is the kind of player Payton wants at quarterback. Someone who has the ability to know his offense on a molecular level — calls, checks, route concepts, blocking, schedule, construction of the plan, etc. — then the focus to carry it all out with the repetitive efficiency of a Xerox machine. This is how Kyle Shanahan wants his offense. It’s how Sean McVay wants his offense. And it’s definitely how Payton wants his offense. When a quarterback isn’t getting that job done in an overwhelmingly high percentile of his drops, the clock begins ticking on his tenure. It’s how Jared Goff became Matthew Stafford. It’s how Jimmy Garoppolo became Trey Lance and Lance became Brock Purdy. And now it’s how Russell Wilson will become someone else manning the controls in Denver.

None of this is to strictly blame Wilson in this whole Broncos mess. It’s to say he and Payton were a bad fit, arguably from the start. For the balance of his career, Wilson has been a player with a strong running game and high-level defense, complementing his ability to play a solid percentage of reactive football. But he’s not the same athlete he was in his mid-20s, and that has impacted his ability to successfully pull off second reaction plays. Instead, what Payton and Wilson critics have seen more recently is missed opportunities from a quarterback who isn’t seeing well beyond the defense in front of him.

And that’s where the breadcrumbs of frustration have come in.

Arguably the first sign of trouble for Wilson was Payton bringing backup Jarrett Stidham in on a two-year contract that raised some eyebrows, boosting him from a league-minimum salary of $965,000 to an annual average value of $5 million. That deal felt odd at the time, and the two-year duration was suggestive of wanting to have the option of starting Stidham at some point if Wilson was no longer viable in Payton’s eyes. Now that’s exactly where we are.

Then in September, the season kicked off with Payton talking about simplifying verbiage or having Wilson wear a wristband. Next came a multitude of games where Wilson often looked most comfortable operating in a two-minute offense that relied on only a small fraction of Payton’s playbook. Then there was the sideline blowup in Detroit, in which Payton screamed at Wilson in a manner that he knew would be captured by cameras and likely replayed and talked about incessantly. He’s been on TV, folks. He’s smart and knew exactly how that moment would play out.

And finally came this week, when Payton raised a significant late-December red flag, talking about the offense often running at an average or below-average level — and punctuating it again with talk about taking more out of the scheme to make it run more easily.

For Payton, this represents a ceiling for an offense that certainly hasn’t looked overly dynamic this season. An investigation into that reality has to start with two people: the head coach who designed the scheme and the quarterback who is running it. And Payton repeatedly pointed at his quarterback as the culprit over the course of the season.

That is why Wilson is on his way out of Denver. We can all talk about the problematic contract extension and how much Wilson is getting paid, but the truth is Wilson likely wouldn’t be starting in Denver next season even if he was making half of his scheduled paycheck. That’s how much Payton cares about his offense functioning like a square peg being utilized as a screwdriver.

So what does that mean in Denver? We can draw three conclusions.

First, Payton is effectively running the team. Moving on from Wilson starts with him, and that’s an immense sign that he’s dictating the roster moving forward. That raises the question about the future standing of general manager George Paton and whether Wilson is just the first in a two-pronged change. Cutting Wilson after this season could be done only with the stamp of approval from ownership, leaving us to see what part Paton played, if any, in the final decision.

Second, the next quarterback is going to be Payton’s selection, which puts him squarely into an intensifying spotlight. It’s one thing to look outward and say that it was a poor fit with a star quarterback he inherited. It’s a whole other problem when you hand pick the next quarterback and the offense continues to look dated or less effective than anything Payton accomplished in New Orleans with Brees.

Finally, this is now a fairly high-level rebuild ahead for the Broncos. Unless Stidham lights up the final two games in a way that thrusts him into the offseason as the presumed starter — which is hard to imagine and a dangerously small sample size — then Denver will be in the market for a quarterback this offseason. And what makes most sense is a rookie he can mold from Day 1, or a cheap veteran he has a shared history with. Either route, it’s a quarterback reboot and some roster retooling.

Four months ago, all of this would have looked from afar like a worst-case scenario for Payton’s start. Missing the postseason, casting off Wilson by the end of the season, thrusting the franchise into the awkwardness of people wondering about the GM's future — that’s a lot of carnage and drama in a short period of time.

But Sean Payton went into this with his eyes open. He chose the Broncos as much as the Broncos chose him. And this might have been his plan all along, clear as the trail of breadcrumbs that started long ago and ended Wednesday.